Terry Marotta: A nation of whiners

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York" says Shakespeare's Richard III in the opening scene of the play by the same name.

He's also the king crying "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" just before the final battle. Alas, no horse appeared and he was summarily 'de-crowned', so to speak, done to death by sharp blows to the head, as his skull plainly shows.

Mind you, this is THE Richard the Third, news of whose recently exhumed skeleton just broke upon our 21st century heads.

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Scientists knew it was Richard; DNA testing doesn't lie. Also, here, before our eyes is that famously twisted spine, though it's clear now he had scoliosis and not the humped back legend gives him.

I have been thinking of him recently because he reminds me a little of all of us with his grousing about winters and discontents. I mean, could we do any MORE whining in this season when the earth lies dormant?

A shopkeeper I am beginning to know tells me she is amazed at how much people complain about things.

"It's so cold!" they say the second they step into her shop.

Or, "Where's the SUN?!"

Or, "Do you believe all this SNOW?!"

And then it's a good bet they start in listing their maladies.

I think we all do it: whine, I mean.

I practically make a living doing it, in the blog I write.

The word 'blog' comes from shoehorning the term 'web' right in close against the word 'log', as in the journal a ship's captain keeps.

Because I too see a blog a kind of public journal, I 'post' on a near-daily basis. Hence the evidence is right there, eternally and undeniably: I too am a whiner.

This past month I whined about it all:

How my husband David caught the flu because, unlike me, HE hadn't had the sense to get a flu shot.

How the awful cough he had caused him to lie beside me nights for two full weeks, spraying fountains of bacteria into the air with the regularity of Old Faithful.

I went on. I told about how I then caught the cough and began sending similar germ-plumes into the air over our bed for the next two weeks.

I also whined about how I couldn't get back from a recent trip away because of the blizzard Nemo, going on and on about how hard that was, even though I was in sunny Arizona.

I whined about having to wait for 12 hours all alone in the airport before the two 'red-eye' flights I spent pinned against the wall of the cabin, first by a ponytailed giant whose wide-load of a belly pressed upon my arm for two hours; and then by a pair of men who slept like the dead for five-and-half of the six-hour flight while I could only fantasize about visits to the bathroom at the back of the plane.

When you start in whining it seems it is hard to stop.

Anyway when I got home after this week away and realized that I still felt crummy, I finally made an appointment at the Urgent Care clinic.

The very first thing the professionals there did, after hearing my story?

They slapped a facemask over my nose and mouth and told me to keep it on 'til I left the hospital.

It was a facemask, yes, but I knew what else it was:

It was a muzzle, and by then it was just what I needed.

Write Terry at terrymarotta@verizon.net or care of Ravenscroft Press PO 270 Winchester MA 01890. Google "Terry Marotta", "Exit Only" and the word "Contagion" to see pictures of her, gagged, at the clinic.